Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Catalog your books at FictionDB!

It seems that every book site out there lets you catalog your books for free and so now FictionDB will, too. Sign-up and start adding books to your shelves right away. Don’t forget you can do bulk uploads, too.

If you have had a FictionDB account in the past (even a trial subscription), you can now login for free to that same account. At login you will be directed to a payment page. You can choose to continue with payment or choose the free membership. Just click on Continue With Free Membership at the upper right-hand side of the payment screen.

Along with this new change, we have reduced the price of an annual membership to $20. To see what each of the feature sets includes, take a look at our comparison chart. We have also discontinued the free trial and the free book with membership promotion.

So, why are we making all these changes? Well, it’s all about growth. FictionDB needs to grow and find new people who value what we have to offer. There are quite a few tools out there (mostly inaccurate) that measure traffic to the different sites and we have taken a good, hard look at our competition. Every business needs to assess its position in the marketplace now and then and determine what changes, if any, need to be made. The changes we are making reflect that analysis.

But what about revenue, you might ask? Aren’t we just throwing away money by reducing the membership price? Yes and no. We all remember Economics 101 – supply and demand. Same thing here, short term revenue loss for long term viability. So, if you decide not to renew your membership and just use the free features, please support our advertisers and our affiliate programs with Amazon – particularly when you decide to buy that big-screen TV :)

So, if a lot of the site is free, why should you subscribe? For less than $2 a month, you can support the effort in maintaing the site. Isn't that reason enough? No? Well, there are a few key features not included for free. The biggest is the Advanced Search. No other site lets you search through synopses, time periods, sub-genres, you name it. The Google search for FictionDB is good, but it will never search the actual database for exact criteria. Another key feature in the premium site is the lack of ads. Without ads on each page, the information can be arranged in a more user-friendly fashion. Many of us are also getting internet-ready cell phones and want the ability to keep track of our reading on-the-go. The FictionDB mobile site is part of the upgraded version.

We hope you like the new changes and find FictionDB to still be the best source of fiction information on the internet. If not, let us know about it!

*** A note to current subscribers: If you subscribed within the last three months at $29.99, three additional months have been added to the length of your subscription. If you are having trouble logging in or receiving errors, see this blog article.

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About Me

FictionDB, run by Kelly and Art Wong, opened its virtual doors in November 1999 with the mission to use the Internet to provide complete, accurate and reliable information for readers of genre fiction.